One year ago, we shared our design and vision for X-BAT, the world’s first autonomous vertical take off and launch (VTOL) strike fighter. Today, as I write this, the first-full scale X-BAT prototype is complete and on its way from our development facility in Frisco, Texas, to our flight test facility in Newton, Kansas. This milestone represents a year of sustained effort and discipline from a team that committed to an ambitious design and build schedule and delivered. That is no small feat. ...

Practical tools for design engineers to explore possible futures through speculative design Practical tools for design engineers to explore possible futures through speculative design

Clara and I went to the local Sydney Hammerbarn recently, and decided to try somewhere new for our morning coffee. We left Thornleigh station on the Aldi side, and ended up walking past this cute cafe called the Dinoni on Railway Parade we hadn’t seen before. The decor was incredibly charming, and the Xmas decorations were already up. We tried their breakfast rolls (technically more lunch for us at that point, cough) and our usual espressos and piccolos. They were perfect. The warm...

Quick Note: I started writing this a few months ago as I finished up the last few bits on the Recovery Kit 3, and some changes delayed things a bit. First, my startup license for Fusion 360 is nearing its end, but miraculously Solid Craft started up and it's been wonderful so far- and the design has actually been finished up on the app. I recognize that Fusion may be included for some of you as your daily profession, but for many hobbyists its format has been a barrier to editing my files. S...

It's time for a dev blogger's favorite topic: blogging about my new blogging setup. After migrating my blog from Hexo to Eleventy , building a photography website and creating a personal one-pager , it was time to find a new digital home for all my projects. If you notice any issue after the migration, please let me know . I redirect the RSS feed to the new domain, but you might want to update the feed URL in your reader. Motivation I've been maintaining three different websites under tw...

In 1971, economist Thomas Schelling asked whether mild individual preferences for similar neighbours could produce large-scale residential segregation. The answer is yes: even when each agent requires only 30% of occupied neighbours to share its type, the population self-organises into sharply segregated clusters. The Schelling model is an example of an agent-based model: Place two types of agents on a grid, leaving some cells empty. At each step, identify dissatisfied agents and move each...

The Golden Temple, Amritsar, by Edwin Lord Weeks, via WikiArt . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at space fiber optic cable manufacturing, nuclear district heating, Spain’s high-speed rail crash, China’s spaceplane, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housing An independent committee’s report on the huge Hong ...

tl;dr; GitHub’s language bar counts every byte in your repo, including generated docs and test suites. A few lines in .gitattributes tell it what to skip. For my project, that took it from “75% HTML” to roughly 62% Rust and 38% Python, which is what the project really is. You know that colorful bar on every GitHub repo’s page, the one that says what the project is written in ? I just learned you can tell it what to count. On one of my projects, it made a big difference. Why doe...

Many people still picture innovation as a line. The professor thinks and publishes. The engineer reads the paper and designs a product. The customer consumes it. It rarely works that way. The industrial revolution was not set off by professors writing papers. It was driven by demand for cheap and better clothing for the masses. Demand came first. Michael Stonebraker made a related point in “Where We Have Failed” (2018). He argued that the database research community has lost its customer...

Liz Fong-Jones’s proposal to add maps.Grow was accepted on October 29. It lets you make room in a map that already exists. make(M, n) already does this for a new map. A Go map grows on its own as you add entries. When it runs out of room, the runtime allocates a larger hash table and rehashes the entries into it. The old table is left for the garbage collector. A loop that adds thousands of entries can hit this again and again. Each time costs CPU and creates more garbage. If you know ...

This is a schematic of the gearing of the Antikythera mechanism, from Tony Freeth’s 2021 Nature paper, “ A Model of the Cosmos in the Ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism “. In my opinion this is the most comprehensive and well-supported of the several theories which fill in the missing portions of the mechanism. Use this along with the supplementary manuscript and supplementary videos in the link above to figure out how to construct the device (noting my comment on the paper about a small ...

A recent paper argues that frontier LLMs can work with neural network weights directly. This seems superhuman, but it isn’t. The paper shows that GPT-6 Astra can take a small neural network and interact with its weights directly, “well past what we’d expect from humans or conventional algorithms”. Specifically, Astra was able to identify what games a small network 1 was trained to play just by looking at the weights, and even tweak the weights itself. The most impressive result is A...

Thailand is the only country in the world which has active civil and scientific space programs, and is also party to the US-led Artemis Accords as well as China-led ILRS frameworks for cooperative lunar exploration. Which is why the Moon Village Association’s 10th global lunar symposium piqued my interest since Thailand’s leading space organization, called Geo-Informatics and Space Technology Development Agency ( GISTDA ), co-hosted the event in Bangkok last week on October 26 & 27...

New in the SumatraPDF pre-release builds : Current search match stands out When searching, the current match is now highlighted with your FixedPageUI.SelectionColor and all other matches use a secondary orange color, so it’s easy to see which match you’re on ( #5740 ). Toolbar buttons for external viewers with text or SVG icons External viewers configured in the ExternalViewers advanced setting can now appear as toolbar buttons, using the new ...

There will never be a leap second again. At least not for UTC. At the CGPM , they decided the last leap second we'll ever see for UTC, or Coordinated Universal Time, happened back at the end of 2016 . Of course they made that decision while I was out on vacation, so I'm just getting this video up now: But what's the CGPM, why does this matter, and why am I excited about it? There will never be a leap second again. At least not for UTC. At the CGPM , they decided the ...

As 2026 hurtles towards the holiday season and then on into 2027, I took a moment to canvass opinion from some of y’all as to the shape of this newsletter. As 2026 hurtles towards the holiday season and then on into 2027, I took a moment to canvass opinion from some of y’all as to the shape of this newsletter. As 2026 hurtles towards the holiday season and then on into 2027, I took a moment to canvass opinion from some of y’all as to the shape of this newsletter. As 2026 hurtles...

Speech is a useful medium for communicating with AI, both as an input/output channel and as back-and-forth. Over 2026 I’ve been increasing the amount of speech I/O and have collected a fair number of use cases. Input Voice is, of course, great for rambling at coding agents. Oftentimes the transactional “just talking with the agent” conversational back-and-forth is easier to ramble out than it is to type. I also occasionally have wrist sensitivity issues that make it difficult to type ...

Flow found in the falling Amber aurora of Day. Gentle crisp sounds calling Memories created, lay. Fields of colour hold light In skies and on ground Memories ever held tight Created in the round. Flow found in the falling Amber aurora of Day. Gentle crisp sounds calling Memories created, lay. Fields of colour hold light In skies and on ground Memories ever held tight Created in the round. Flow found in the falling Amber aurora of Day. Gentle crisp sounds calling Memories ...

Yesterday's hot paper was Sparks of Weight-Space Programming: LLMs can natively read & write neural network weights by Rikiya Takehi, Jayden Teoh, Alex Zhang, and Omar Khattab. The paper (OK, the authors classify is as a "blog post", but it's paper-shaped) found that frontier models, in particular GPT-6 Astra, can both interpret and modify the raw weights of a machine learning model - literally a text description of the model containing a bunch of floating point numbers. I've been playing with...

A few people have reached out to me to ask how I did X, or Y with my site, so I thought I'd talk about the customisations I've made to this site, and how they work. Firstly, this site runs on Pure Blog , a CMS that I've been building over the last year or so. As it's matured, I've added features that allow more advanced users to do clever things without having to fiddle with the core platform. This means that people generally shouldn't have to fork the project and should continue to get all t...

blanket your familiar star in solar panels. earth and her sisters trace ellipses in colder starlight now. devoting everything, everything, to one last simulation -- a world where trillions of koalas populate the ocean like krill blanket your familiar star in solar panels. earth and her sisters trace ellipses in colder starlight now. devoting everything, everything, to one last simulation -- a world where trillions of koalas populate the ocean like krill blanket your familiar star in solar panel...

(Throughout this post I will assume that the recent results by OpenAI and Anthropic contain correct proofs of what they claim.) I wrote the following about 2 years ago but did not post it. It's dated, but that's the point. BEGIN DOCUMENT FROM TWO YEARS AGO Why do we think \(P\ne NP\)? a) Lots of people have worked on SAT and other NP-complete problems, without getting them in P.  This is not mathematical evidence but it is worth noting. b) If SAT is in P then all problems in NP are in P.  Th...

I’ve been fascinated with local LLMs for a couple of years now. The better open weight models, including some that inference on regular, higher-end consumer hardware at tolerable speeds, are now reliable enough to handle simpler programming tasks. This requires a coding harness, but so far this year I’ve been disappointed by all the harness offerings. For inexplicable reasons most are built with web stacks, and consume enormous amounts of memory. At its core a coding harness is essentially...